Hello, > I have a few questions about indexing and locking in Cassandra: > - if I understood well only row level indexing exists prior to v0.7. I mean > only the primary keys are indexed. Is that true?
Yes and no. The row name is the key which you use to fetch the row from cassandra. There are methods to iterate thru rows but that's not efficient and should be used only in batch operations. Columns inside rows are sorted by their names so they are also indexes as you use the column name to fetch the contents of the column. If you want to index data by other ways you need to build your own application code which maintains such indexes and the upcoming 0.7 version will bring some handy features which makes the coders job much easier. > - is it possible to use composite primary keys? For instance I have a user > object: User(name,birthday,gender,address) and I want to have the > (name,birthday) columns as PK. Can I do? If yes, how? You can always create your row key as a string like "$name_$birthday". Did this answer to your question? > - does Cassandra support CF (table) level locking? Couls someone explain > me/provide a link how? No, cassandra doesn't have any locking capabilities. You can always use some external locking mechanism like zookeeper [http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/] or implement your own sollution on top of cassandra (not recommended as it's quite hard to get it correctly). - Juho Mäkinen / Garo
